Volume 63
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Elena Esposito, Dominik Hofmann, Costanza Coloni, "Can a Predicted Future Still Be an Open Future? Algorithmic Forecasts and Actionability in Precision Medicine," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
The openness of the future is rightly considered one of the qualifying aspects of the temporality of modern society. The open future, which does not yet exist in the present, implies radical unpredictability. This article discusses how, in the last few centuries, the resulting uncertainty has been managed with probabilistic tools that compute present information about the future in a controlled way. The probabilistic approach has always been plagued by three fundamental problems: performativity, the need for individualization, and the opacity of predictions. We contrast this approach with recent forms of algorithmic forecasting, which seem to turn these problems into resources and produce an innovative form of prediction. But can a predicted future still be an open future? We explore this specific contemporary modality of historical futures by examining the recent debate about the notion of actionability in precision medicine, which focuses on a form of individualized prediction that enables direct intervention in the future it predicts.
ARTICLES
María Inés La Greca, "With or Against Hayden White? Reflections on Theory of History and Subject Formation," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article reflects on Hayden White's understanding of the subject and explores how best to move forward discussions in theory of history after his arguments about narrativity. To do so, I reconsider his arguments in light of more recent feminist and queer theorizations. Through a reconstruction of the current international new wave of feminism and LGBTQ+ activism as a rich and complex social movement that involves a narration of its own (practical) past, I will recontextualize and revaluate White's insight from the perspective of Judith Butler's theory of subject formation. The argument will unfold in four parts. First, I will recall White's ironic and existential stance on language and narrativity in the representation of reality and in relation to social beliefs. Second, I will again raise the question of the value of narrativity, as framed by White, in the context of the publication of a recent feminist manifesto. It is here that another issue will emerge as crucial: the relationship between the limits of linguistic self-consciousness and the question of the subject. In the third part, my argument will take a partial turn "against White" and toward Butler's subject formation theory. My claim will be that there is a residue of the belief in the sovereign individual in White's insistence on self-consciousness. However, I will also show that his suspicion regarding the psychological impulse toward narrative closure can be re-elaborated as the challenge Butler is facing with their theory of subject formation: that of critically resisting the belief in our being coherent and self-sufficient individuals. In the fourth part, I will present Butler's refiguration of the thesis of the subject's opacity in terms of the primary relationality that binds human beings to one another, and I will offer a new understanding of the individual, norms, agency, infancy, and ethics. Finally, I will conclude that we are bodies in history and that theory of history can find a promising line of research through this conception of the subject, a conception that reframes how we understand the intimate links between political consciousness, historicity, and embodiment. I also claim that this line of research constitutes an ethics for our historical undoing.
Christopher Stedman Parmenter, "The Twilight of the Gods? Genomic History and the Return of Race in the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, aDNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work—a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism. Even worse, some genomic historians continue to make troubling overtures toward the ethnonationalist Right, which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s. This article traces the intellectual genealogy of genomic history from World War II to the present, examines recent attempts to answer criticism from the humanities and social sciences, and suggests paths for responsible use of aDNA in historical and prehistorical scholarship.
Martin Klüners, "The Unconscious in Individuals and Society: On the Application of Psychoanalytic Categories in Historiography," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
The long-held conviction of a mutually exclusive relationship between psychoanalysis, which allegedly proceeds purely in terms of individual psychology, and historical social science, which is interested primarily in the analysis of collectives, has significantly hindered dialogue between the disciplines. Norbert Elias's “figurational” sociology, which has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and group therapy, has the potential to indicate a way in which social science-oriented historical research might investigate the network of relations between individual and “collective” psychic processes without relying on artificial dichotomies. Elias's figurational theory, for its part, does not sufficiently take into account the question of a collective or social unconscious, so this article examines approaches that attempt to explore and conceptually define a supra-individual unconscious.
Mark Ian Thomas Robson, "Acts of Thought and Re-Enactment in Collingwood’s Philosophy of History," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article explores one of Collingwood's most puzzling claims—that, in re-enacting a past act of thought, I can revive not just the propositional content of that act but also the very act of thought itself. This aspect of Collingwood's ideas has been largely ignored, and, when not ignored, it has been almost universally rejected. After all, we might ask, how can it be that two acts of thought—one, say, had by Carol in the library on Wednesday and another act of thought had by Harold in his study on Thursday—are literally identical? I explore this baffling claim and, in particular, Collingwood's argument that acts of thought can have the identity of a continuant. I try to show how the idea of the identity of the continuant might be used to remove some of the puzzlement in Collingwood's claim about literal identity between acts of thought; I thus show how Harold, on Thursday, might be able to experience the exact same act of thought that Carol had on Wednesday.
Vanita Seth, "(Un)Doing History: A Case for Epistemological Alterity," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension concerns the fraught relationship between history as a site of knowledge production with some proximity to engaging and producing truth and history as constructed, wherein its purported object of study, the past, is not an ontological fact but a cultural artifact. In this instance, what we witness is less a debate among scholars within history than an amorphic anxiety about history. This article makes a case for engaging the radical alterity that confronts the historian of the Middle Ages. It does so, however, cognizant of an ontological impasse: if alterity is attentive to difference, a difference that resists translation into modern knowledge regimes, then what does it mean to engage it historically—that is, through a temporal structure that would have been foreign to the very period of study?
REVIEW ESSAY
Anna Duensing on Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture by Bruce Kuklick, History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Ethan Kleinberg, "True North," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
In this article, I suggest that our current relation to the sociopolitical future is one where we are blocked from changing our view of what that future is or could be. In this sense, we are trapped in a time loop wherein the challenges before us are continuously met with social and political solutions designed for futures past, old futures. These past possible futures are ones that failed to solve the problems they were offered to address. As such, there is no growth, change, or redemption that could activate a new future; there is only the rehearsal of the old ones: failed futures from the past. What's more, this process of defuturing also relies on a winnowing of the past such that only those pasts that align with our present are allowed to be brought forward. I argue that, to reactivate our future, we also need to reactivate our pasts. I am thinking of those pasts that we do not seek or do not want but that nevertheless come to us. These are the multiple and competing pasts that swirl with present and future as in a vortex, denying any one past the privilege of guiding, directing, or foreclosing the future. It is only by facing this vortex and reopening the past that we can re-open the future and escape the time loop of our ever-receding horizon.
ARTICLES
Gavin Lucas, "Adventures in Tideland," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
One of the more significant issues to have emerged from the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has concerned the apparent incommensurability of human and natural history and the vastly different timescales involved. More generally, such discourse raises critical questions about the very different way time is conceptualized in the natural sciences as opposed to in the social sciences and humanities. In this article, I draw on my own disciplinary background in archaeology in order to contribute to these differences and build bridges between the two disciplinary domains by foregrounding the materiality of time. I use a partly allegorical approach inspired by Edwin Abbott's nineteenth-century novel Flatland to investigate a notion of three-dimensional of time, which I compare with Gilles Deleuze's three temporal syntheses. The article argues for the concept of Thick Time, which emphasizes the importance of time as constituted by things, whereby things make time rather than exist within it. A material time is one that foregrounds time as a mode of transmission, a “passing on,” and of the persistence of the past in the present.
Lisa Regazzoni, "The Uncertain Stuff of History: Outline of a Theory of Intentionality—Thing by Thing," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
This article addresses the issue of historical knowledge in relation to material evidence. More specifically, it asks, What objects capture the historian's attention and what knowledge is gained from those objects? What does the historian's gaze select as “things of history” and thus as removed from a world of object assemblages and fluid matter? Is it the case that only artifacts deliberately produced or modified by humans (regardless of the purpose) count as “things of history”? Or do physical entities produced by unintended human and nonhuman factors also display temporal endurance or alteration occurring over time and resonate with humans? Are “things of history” only entities endowed with shape, or do formless materials qualify too? In this article, I outline a theory of intentionality in relation to material items for two main reasons. First, it allows for a “critique of material evidence,” which is still missing in the historical discipline. Second, it enables us to address any remaining epistemological, ethical, or political issues, biases, or contradictions associated with the multifaceted research on material culture that affect the way we do history.
Daniel Cunningham, "Class and Class Consciousness According to E. P. Thompson," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
In this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays “The Peculiarities of the English” and “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” In the first section, I argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that Thompson developed a genuinely historical materialist theory of class formation as a “structured process” that moves from class struggle to class consciousness, a theory that complicates the frequent description of Thompson as a “voluntarist.” In the second section, I take a more critical position toward Thompson's understanding of class, discussing a tension between this notion of class as structured process and his numerous invocations of class as a form of “lived experience” whose diversity and unpredictability exceed theorization. This tension aside, Thompson claims that, in the case of the nineteenth-century English working class, to which he dedicated so much research, lived experience coincided with the more general structured process he posits. In the third section, therefore, I more fully elaborate on this specific process of class formation as Thompson portrays it, identifying and discussing three intertwined threads: (1) a movement from a past-oriented defense of traditional institutions to a future-oriented demand for reforms, (2) the development of oppositional, class-specific pedagogical institutions and practices, and (3) the creation of a distinct class culture (which Thompson closely aligns with the achievement of class consciousness) that is aware both of itself and of its antagonism with other classes.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Ekin Erkan, "Beneath Meaning, Orientational Narratives, and Dante's Essentialist Theory of Art: On Noël Carroll's Elucidations and Contestations," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
In this review of Noël Carroll's Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art: Essays, I focus on the issue of Danto's philosophy of art history and Carroll's position that, unlike Danto, we ought to understand Danto's “end of art (history)” thesis as an orientational narrative (that is, a pragmatic-instrumental narrative with cognitive purchase) rather than as a historical-scientific narrative. In making this case, I show how Carroll's argument demonstrates that Danto's “end of art (history)” thesis is in tension with Danto's philosophy of history. Furthermore, I engage and respond to the most substantive critiques that Carroll proffers in this text, especially as they concern Danto's philosophy of art history and the related issue of Danto's (art) historically anchored search for a definition of art. In giving special attention to the socio-historical background conditions (namely, “the artworld” conditions) for an object to be conferred art status, I also show how Carroll's incisive reading offers a critical rejoinder to claims made by recent critics such as Robert B. Pippin and Ivan Gaskell, who have dehistoricized Danto's definition of art, claiming that it allows for any artist to enfranchise any object as an artwork, proper.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Alexandra Lianeri on Translation and History: A Textbook by Theo Hermans, History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
Juhan Hellerma on Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World by Hartmut Rosa, History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
